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An Interview with Jessie Daniels about the subconscious terrorism of racism & the need to take down nice white ladies

Dear friends and fam, 

Sometimes, talking to my fellow white people about our kind is exhausting on all fronts: emotionally, psychologically, and physically. There is so much resistance to even the term “white supremacy” that to utter it, many times, you get reactions from people as if you had just said the name “Voldemort.”

One thing that I’ve been weighed down by lately is just how alone it can feel to be a white person condemning whiteness and insisting on some profound historical corrections. (Please see Indigenous People’s Day).  Today’s interview and book spotlight is meant as a corrective to this fatigue, as it is as enraging as it is profoundly hopeful. 

What I’m Reading is back, in extended form: I am so excited about this week’s newsletter because it’s about the sociologist and author Jessie Daniels, her fight against white supremacy, and her latest book, Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in it, and How We Can Help Dismantle It. In her book she articulates a stunning critique of white saviors, who in education, are nearly all nice white ladies (In 2018, 79.3% of public school teachers were white, and of those, about 75% were women). 

But more than that, Daniel’s book Nice White Ladies provides a route for a way of being differently, which is a necessary project if we are to begin to re-imagine the role public education should have in our country today. In so many ways, Daniels has been foundational for my thinking, writing, and career so forgive if I fangirl hard, but y’all, if you like this newsletter, I guarantee you’ll find her book fascinating. So go buy Nice White Ladies. It’s out today. 

Daniels, as it so happens, is another ex-academic who has forged her own path of social justice and discourse beyond the ivory towers.

Daniels has been thinking about these issues since her dissertation and subsequent first book White Lies: Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in White Supremacist Disourse, which was published in 1997. I found this thin book on the shelf of my then-roommate (s/o to Jillian Powers!) as I was embarking on my own book project about the devastating and toxic impact of white supremacy on our nation’s public education system, and it was there, in her courageous prologue, that I found my resolve. 

Written in 1997, Daniels explains her impetus for placing the personal alongside her strident critique of white supremacy as simply, “following the call of Patricia Hill Collins and other Black feminists,” as she explained to me in our interview last week. If you’re involved with higher education, you can probably guess the backlash her prologue garnered because of this chosen Black feminist methodology. Regardless, her frankness about her own family’s ties with the KKK, her personal identity as a Lesbian, and her chosen topic of white supremacy necessitated a prologue as a project in truth-telling (even if no one in academia wanted to hear it at the time). Nevertheless, Daniels persisted. And so do I. 

In the last paragraph of this provocative prologue, we can find the origins of Nice White Ladies and how Daniels has shaped her work:

“For me, this kind of terrorism exists primarily at the level of the subconscious. But this awareness of being the "subject" of white supremacist discourse has given me, as much as anything else, an even deeper realization of my own privilege within a white supremacist context. Through the course of my daily life, I do not encounter racial hostility or overt threats of homophobic violence or more than the usual amount of gender oppression; instead, I can often coast on the privileges of middle-class whiteness and the presumption of heterosexuality.” - Jessie Daniels in her introduction to Nice White Ladies

This subconscious terrorism of the mind that white supremacy perpetuates is precisely what we are so adamant about making real, because if you can’t first name the white supremacy lurking in your own mind, you aren’t going to be of much use in the revolution. 

And with that introduction, here’s the beginning of our conversation, the rest will come in the weeks to follow, because I can’t think of a better way to honor Halloween month than by interrogating white supremacy and white women’s role in it, since it is psychological horror at its best. 

The Project of Making Visible White Supremacy:

AH: Thanks for agreeing to speak with me, I’m so excited for this. I’d like to begin with this question that I think we are both deeply concerned with in our work: How do we make real and urgent what’s going on? Further, how do we make visible white supremacy?

For me, I found that going back to story, narrative nonfiction, specifically was the best medium I could find to embark on this project. 

JD: It’s hard right?

AH: I don’t think that’s a question with an answer, but maybe we can begin there.

JD: Yeah, I mean it’s a hard question in part because, In my experience, white people I talk to, mostly middle class liberal types, are allergic to the term white supremacy. So you say that, and it’s like ::gestures with her arms:: the room is cleared. I had a brief encounter with a big tech company whose name you would recognize, and I was trying to do a session with them about whiteness and how our assumptions about the world shape, for example, the technology that we make. And somewhere in there, I used the term white supremacy, and one of the bosses that had hired me said, “well we won’t be sharing any of that…” 

So I feel like I’m often, it’s funny when I was talking with the publisher about this book, and we mostly agreed on the title, but there was a big thorough robust conversation about whether or not people would buy this book if it had the term white supremacy in it. And I was like, “well, that’s terms used a lot in the book so…”

(let’s prove them wrong: buy her book here). 

AH: Yeah, it’s also important to name it I think. I mean hey, at least you used the term “white supremacy,” my early editors of my book so far have been like “Allison, you can’t say that about whiteness itself, you have to specify you’re talking about white supremacy” and I just think, “I’m not hearing the difference”

JD: Hah! Yeah. I don’t know if I have an answer to that question, but when I do, I’ll let you know! It’s certainly one I keep grappling with so I’ll let you know what I come up with.” 

And here, I interrupt the normal interview format to explain that I think Daniels is being overly humble. Let’s turn the introduction from Nice White Ladies, so I can show you what I mean. She writes:

“Just as I inherited this constellation of identities that I have chosen to interrogate and reject, similarly, I want this book to challenge and subvert both “whiteness” and “ladyhood.” And that further, Nice White Ladies is so much more than “merely the refusal of a set of ideas, this book points to another way of being in the world. There are white women who have found new pathways to wholeness and resistance. I write about them with the hope that there will be more of us, and new generations in which these conversations will no longer be necessary.”

The stakes of dismantling white supremacy? Why, it gives us radical new ways of being in the world not tied to hate and violence, of course. 

And in this tall order, for Daniels at least, she knows exactly where to begin. For her, the project of making visible and urgent the need to dismantle white supremacy begins with what we always tell kids to do (but rarely do as adults): it’s to tell the truth. As she says in her introduction to Nice White Ladies, 

“For me, telling the truth about white supremacy and working to end it are interlaced with my own liberation and yours. I want this book to be a catalyst for dismantling the systemic racism that we, nice white ladies, have upheld. And I want this book to help women raised white to reach beyond the strictures of niceness and the constraints of ladyhood to experience their full humanity and to join the rest of us working toward a better world for everyone.”

I can’t think of a better note to end on. Next week, I’ll continue to explore Jessie Daniel’s Nice White Ladies in “Affirmative Action & Karens.”

Until next time,

A

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